Review: Gerry Anderson’s SPACE PRECINCT, The Complete Series 5 Disc Set

By Kez Wilson

I’m a huge fan of Gerry Anderson’s “Supermarionation” series. You know, the ones with the creepy puppets and bizarrely cool special effects like THUNDERBIRDS and CAPTAIN SCARLET. Heck, I even managed to publish a comic book based on Anderson’s seminal Supermarionation series SUPERCAR, one of my cherished childhood television memories. I think these programs, while ostensibly for children, were done with very adult sensibilities. You could tell Anderson really wanted to be producing live-action programming.

He finally made the jump with his cult favorite science fiction series UFO, which was chocked full of explosions, cool spacecraft and shapely moon girls in purple wigs. But I was never as big a fan of his live action material. UFO was kind of fun, but I found SPACE:1999 a bit of a snooze fest. So when SPACE PRECINCT hit the airwaves in 1994, it slipped under my radar. Periodically I’d catch it while channel surfing late at night and have a brief “What the hell” moment when I’d catch a glimpse of what looked like a cop show with bizarre bug-eyed aliens in flying patrol cars.

So with the release of Image Entertainment’s set of the complete series on DVD, I finally got to find out what the deal was with Gerry Anderson’s cops-in-space show. He actually produced the pilot for the series almost a decade before. In 1986 he produced SPACE POLICE, which featured then Anderson regular Shane Rimmer as Lieutenant Chuck Brogan, a New York cop who had found a new beat in outer space cleaning up crime on the planet Zar XL5 (a little tip of the space helmet to one of his earlier puppet series, FIREBALL XL5). Rimmer looked totally miscast as one of two human characters surrounded by puppets and actors wearing unconvincing furry cathead masks.

Jump forward about eight years and SPACE PRECINCT hits the syndicated airwaves in the U.S. DALLAS and KNOTTS LANDING alum Ted Shackleford plays Lieutenant Patrick Brogan, ex-New York cop pounding a new extra-terrestrial beat. The only real holdover from the pilot is an annoying robot named Slomo that looks like a mini Uniblab from the Jetsons. Gone are the puppets and furry facemasks, replaced by eerily convincing alien make-ups that usually only leave the actor’s actual mouth exposed.

The first episode plays out like a very standard police procedural, except that most of the cast is wearing Halloween masks. I was not too impressed, but as subsequent episodes reeled out, I began to warm to the series. The effects shots of flying police cars and exploding buildings still look like vintage Gerry Anderson, but they look a lot better than ninety percent of the computer generated dreck featured on certain science fiction cable channels.

And as I mentioned before, the alien designs are pretty nice. The heads are all oversized to accommodate the mechanisms for creating expression which work surprisingly well. The alien characters actually have more expression than Shackelford, who plays Brogan with a kind of bland competence. He doesn’t have the earnestness of a Martin Landau, who chewed up the moonscape in SPACE:1999. Fortunately his character has a wife, two kids, and a couple of human space cops so he doesn’t have to spend all his time playing to giant-headed bug-eyed aliens and green screens.

As far as the music goes, Anderson’s shows have never sounded the same since he parted ways with Barry Gray after the first season of SPACE:1999. Mr. Gray passed away in 1984, so he couldn’t have made a difference for this series, which has a uninspiring soundtrack.

For what is ostensibly a kids program, it gets pretty dark at times. The British have a different idea about what qualifies as kids programming (DOCTOR WHO, anyone?), which is why it didn’t play well in the States. Programmers just didn’t know how to deal with it, so it would get dumped into the wee hours of the morning.

It’s a bare bones set of 24 episodes spread across 5 discs in standard 4:3 presentation. The transfer is clean and sharp. The discs have basic motion menus that allow you to play all or chose which episodes to watch. Episodes have nine chapters each at what would have been commercial breaks. Too bad they couldn’t include the pilot with Shane Rimmer, which as far as I know is only available through Fanderson, the official Gerry Anderson fan club out of the UK.

Bottom line is that it will be a must have for Gerry Anderson completists, but it is also a fun series for those who don’t mind their science fiction with a healthy dose of cheese.

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